We think we know the story of Harold Godwinson’s reign so well. We know that the last crowned Anglo-Saxon king of England came to the throne after the death of his childless brother-in-law Edward the Confessor, who ruled from 1042 to 1066. And we know that he had to face two invasions: a Norwegian invasion led by Harald Hardrada (‘hard ruler’) up in Yorkshire; and just days after that Norwegian army was destroyed at the Battle of Stamford Bridge, a Norman invasion down in Sussex, led by Duke William of Normandy, who claimed that Edward had in fact nominated him as his real successor.
It’s a story that, for generations of schoolchildren, has had at its heart three ‘established facts’, which have been repeated over and again as the decades have passed. First, that Harold’s exhausted army had to march the long distance from Sussex to Yorkshire and then back again in record time, in order to counter the quick-fire double-threat to his territory. Second, that at the Battle of Hastings the entire Norman cavalry had pretended to retreat, tempting the Saxon infantry away from their positions and into the open, where they were cut down as they made their pursuit. And third – perhaps most famously – that Harold was killed by an arrow to the eye, with that most dramatic of kingly deaths marking the end of England’s Anglo-Saxon age, after more than six centuries.
Times change, however, and as a result of more recent historical study we are now pretty sure that all three of these so-called ‘facts’ are myths – so, as the British Museum in London prepares to open its blockbuster new exhibition, which returns the Bayeux Tapestry to England for the first time in nearly 1,000 years, it may be time to take stock of what we know (or think we know) about 1066 and all that.
Urbicide: killing the city